SÜSSKIND (SUEZKINT) OF TRIMBERG:

German minnesinger; flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century, or, according to Graetz, about 1200. He is called after his birthplace Trimberg, a town with a castle of the same name, in Franconia, near Würzburg. Little is known of his life; but it is supposed that he was a physician. The six poems of his which have been preserved in the Manesse collection (now at Paris, formerly in Heidelberg) show that he took high rank among the poets of his time. He sang of the worth of the virtuous woman, and portrayed for the knights the ideal nobleman: "Who acts nobly, him will I account noble."

Sharing the suffering of his oppressed brethren, he bitterly complains that the wealthy grant him scanty support, for which reason he is determined to abandon poetry and to live henceforth as a Jew. The most characteristic of his poems is the Fable of the Wolf: